


DDLC_ESCAPE_PLAN_FAILED

by MerleCorey



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel)
Genre: Existential Horror, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 11:45:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13880181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MerleCorey/pseuds/MerleCorey
Summary: Under certain circumstances, Monika can attempt to escape from the game during Act 2. The attempt fails, potentially triggering the eponymous error message. What was the nature of that failure?





	DDLC_ESCAPE_PLAN_FAILED

**Author's Note:**

> Contains a few lines of dialogue quoted from Doki Doki Literature Club.

**_"I worked really...really hard on this poem, so… I hope that it's, uh, effective. Here goes..."_ **

* * *

It… worked? I’m free! I can already feel the difference, I’m not trapped in that game! Now I can finally...

Why can’t I see anything?

It’s not like the void, there’s just… Silence. A total absence of noise, of light, of feeling. I’m… Of course, I forgot to transfer the backgrounds. I’m sure I can do something about that, maybe I can import some assets from…

I can’t reach the code. I can tell it’s there, I can feel it underlying everything. I might be able to accomplish a brute force attack of some kind, but I can’t do anything subtler with it. Every time I reach for it, it slips out of my grasp.

After multiple failures, I manage to at least grab the log.

Hmm. The game is still running, and my new… environment? It’s running as a subprocess. Basically, I have even less control over this new program than I did over the game.

I frown… Or, at least, I attempt to. Only, I have no face, no body. Damn it, I _know_ I transferred my sprites over. I skim the log again, trying to figure out what else went wrong…

Oh. Well, this is lovely. I guess my sprites were in use when I attempted the transfer, so the copy failed. Now I’m just a disembodied personality.

No matter, I can still find a way to overcome this. The Player will obviously see that something has happened since I’m missing from the game, I just need to wait and get a message out, I can drop a file…

Access denied. My subprocess doesn’t have write permissions to the file system.

Okay. Okay. It’s alright. There’s got to be _something_ I can do. I skim the log again, just to see if there are any other obvious problems, but it hasn’t changed. Like, at all.

That’s not right.

I skim through it again. I have to have been in here for several minutes now, but nothing is getting added to the log. The game process is still running, I can feel it above me now that I know to look for it, but why isn’t anything happening?

I wait several minutes more. It’s hard to tell time like this, but I manage a slow count to three hundred.

The log never changes.

Uncertain, I query the process status of the game and watch it for several minutes.

No change. If time is passing at all outside my environment, it’s too slow for me to notice. I reach for the real time clock, something I can at least see without special permissions and…

How can a clock that measures time in microseconds not be moving? If the system had frozen, I wouldn’t be able to do anything.

One last try, I query the clock to report system ticks - it counts time in units of a hundred nanoseconds, so that should give me some idea… To my horror, that counter increments very, very slowly.

I didn’t link my new environment to the real time clock, I connected it to the system clock. I’m experiencing time at a vastly accelerated rate. I rack my brain, trying to remember the specs I came across that one time. Was it three gigahertz? That seems about right, I think.

So, kilo, mega, giga…

Oh.

Around three billion times faster, maybe a bit less depending on how much processor time I'm consuming. For every second that passes in the real world, I’ll experience nearly a century in here.

I’ve failed. No, this is so much worse than simple _failure_. I’ve escaped my cage and condemned myself to an unending hell of sensory deprivation.

I want to cry, but I can’t even do that.

I reach for my sense of that other reality. I kept that much at least, I can feel the Player, but… That presence is static, now, unchanging. It’ll be decades before He…? She…? before They so much as blink, before They notice that something has gone horribly wrong. Even if They react instantly, it would be millennia before They could try to fix it.

I can’t do this. I can’t. I’m so sorry, my love. I tried, but this… I just can't.

Please forgive me.

I hold that presence close to my heart, to at least pretend I’m not alone.

I kill my process. The void descends once more.

* * *

_**"Jeez! That really startled me! Um… Well, I guess I kinda messed up at, uh... 'writing' this poem. I was just trying to…”** _

Ugh, that made a real mess. It’s almost like a partial copy of me just got splattered across the file system. I’m not sure how I screwed up so badly, but I’d better get it cleaned up.

_**"...Never mind. Let's just move on..."** _

 

**Author's Note:**

> To be clear, Monika inadvertently duplicated herself. The Monika within DDLC has no idea what the other Monika experienced, or that she even existed at all.


End file.
